What does "rich" mean?

In Just how rich is rich, really? MP Dunleavey writes,

• Those who earned less than $30,000 thought that a household income of $74,000 would qualify as rich.
• Those who made $30,000 to $50,000 said an income of $100,000 would be rich.
• And people in the top half of earners were more likely to say that an income of $200,000 earns you the right to the R word.

In An Adjective for Cakes, But Not for Bill Gates, Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley says,

People may disagree on exactly how much money it takes to be rich, but that only confirms that it's an absolute threshold, and that those who have crossed it are delivered from the cares that afflict the rest of us.

That makes no sense to me. If people disagree, then there is no absolute threshold. In fact he begins his article,

BY any objective standard, there are more rich Americans than ever before. More than eight million of us are worth more than $1 million, exclusive of our homes, according to one recent estimate.

And Wikipedia claims

a personal net worth of US $1,000,000 in most parts of the United States Midwest would certainly place a person among the wealthiest citizens....

It's interesting that both of them want to describe wealth in terms of assets rather than income. OK, but a million isn't that much, believe it or not. As Dunleavey writes,

A million bucks, wisely invested, will yield an income of about $40,000 a year, if you follow the financial planning rule of thumb that says you can only draw income equal to 4% of your assets (a must if you're not working and want to be sure your money lasts as long as you do). That's comfortable, but hardly rich.

She cites a couple on a joint income of about $92,000, crossing their fingers that they'll be able to swing a one-week trip to California this year, and another with a combined of about $69,000, who estimates that it would take about $180,000 to be able to have both freedom and family security. She also cites Edward Wolff, a professor of economics at NYU who studies wealth, who

points out that even the people we think of as being "rich and famous" -- i.e. movie, rock and sports stars -- may not be as rich as you think.

"These are people with big incomes, but that doesn't necessarily translate to big wealth," he says. "Just getting it is half the battle -- then you have to maintain it, and that takes a continuous flow of big income."

Dunleavey refers us to the Global Rich List, but that's irrelevant. One could also tell poorer Americans that they're pretty well off: see how that flies.

Anyway, assets seem to be the rule. One guy, who calls himself ruetheday cites an article from Barron's to the effect that

The criteria that they used was the amount of annual income derived solely from investment assets.

The threshold was $100,000 in annual investment income to be considered borderline rich, $200,000 annually to be considered median rich, and $1,000,000 annually to be really rich.

Assuming a rate of return of 8%, this correlates to $1.25 million, $2.5 million, and $12.5 million in investment assets respectively.

Note that income derived from wages and salary did not count, nor did non-investment assets. The implication then was that wealth is a function of the ability to generate income without actually working.

Of course, then the question is, what does "work" mean? Nunberg seems to feel that the rich are shirkers:

...the phrase "the idle rich" has vanished since [the days of Thorstein Veblen and his "The Theory of the Leisure Class"]. Today's leaner billionaires claim to desire money not as a means of avoiding work but as proof of how good they are at it.

But generally the rich invest their money, or one could say, put it to work.